I wanted to write Randy's story, and my story of being his sister, because there are so many people who live through the sorrow and pain of not knowing how to manage a family member who has a singularly unique view of life: a sibling who doesn't fit in or follow the paths the rest of us take; who challenges and bewilders, upsets and dazzles us; who scares some of us away; but who still loves us, in his or her way.
Initial disclosure: I have no particular interest (or disinterest) in Diane Keaton, haven't especially followed (or avoided) her work as an actor, and haven't read her other memoirs; Brother & Sister was simply one of the books making up a stack of ARCs I was able to bring into self-isolation. Having said that, I wonder if I would have connected with this more if I felt more connected to Diane Keaton herself – this is quite a personal narrative of her own family, without a lot of introspection or universality, and while she states that her purpose in writing this was to investigate the sources of her younger brother's demons, I don't know if she found any answers; I certainly don't know how this would help others who are trying to understand difficult sibling relationships in their own lives. So: not really for me, maybe for another. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Pinpointing a mental illness is like finding a needle in a haystack. I wouldn't want to be part of a team that labels the most complex organ of our body with a name. Randy was not a category, and medicine is not an exact science. Part of his saving grace came from the outlet he found in expression, whether it was seemingly negative – visualizing women in sadomasochistic positions – or something aiming for transcendence: writing lyrical poems on the wonder of birds.Early on, we learn that Diane Keaton's mother kept photo albums, journals, and scrapbooks her entire adult life, chronicling her husband's successful professional career and the lives of her four children. Although her only son, Randy, was sensitive and introverted right from the start, he was the apple of his mother's eye, and even as his teenaged and then early adult years didn't follow traditional paths, his mother encouraged Randy's emerging art and desire to be alone. As Randy lived out the end of his days in a memory care facility, Diane had access to all of her brother's journals, collages, and poetry, and along with her mother's documents, she went looking for clues about what went wrong with Randy's life – and it doesn't look like she really found it (and especially because her mother tried to put the rosiest spin on everything she recorded). Diane mentions that Randy took medication for bipolar disorder, that he was once diagnosed as a “schizoid type” (which she disagreed with), and even hints that his brain may have been damaged by forceps during childbirth – but as Diane left her California hometown for an acting career in NYC right out of high school, it doesn't seem that she was present for the long years of intervention and heartache that the rest of her family faced in trying to support Randy, and I didn't get the sense that she ever really understood what his problems were; she went looking for the answers in her mother's and brother's writings – and there are many interesting bits excerpted from each of them – but she didn't really find any answers there.
Of interest: When Randy – a lifelong and unrepentant alcoholic – was in the end stages of liver disease, his other two sisters asked Diane if she would call the transplant centre (who were, understandably, not willing to put Randy's name on a transplant list as he refused to stop drinking) and use her celebrity to change their minds. That call, and a sizeable donation from their rich father's estate, put Randy on the list – and while he did end up getting a liver, and soon after started drinking again, he did live for something like another twenty years. On the one hand, you hate to hear about money and fame bending such life-altering rules, but even though he ended up being tough on that new liver, it certainly wasn't “wasted” on him.
And also: In a passage quoted from their mother's scrapbook, she describes seeing Annie Hall for the first time, which Mrs Hall (for that is Diane Keaton's actual family name) described as, “a love story, covering six years in the life of Woody Allen and Diane Hall Keaton.” And while she was touched by Diane's performance, she was less amused by the depiction of their family in the Easter dinner scene (although she did like Christopher Walken's portrayal of Randy as “a sensitive person with a unique personality.”) So, as an added bonus for the self-isolating, I convinced the family to watch Annie Hall with me after I finished reading this book, and even if Woody Allen apparently bristles at anyone suggesting that there's anything autobiographical in this film, the “Can I confess something” scene (found here on YouTube) – which shows a mentally disturbed young man, complete with strange collages on his bedroom wall – sure looks like Woody Allen interacting with (and kind of cruelly dismissing) the brother that Diane Keaton describes here. Funny that she allowed this.
How had Randy come to find himself sitting in a rental on the wrong side of the Pacific Coast Highway, bordering on old age? How had I, the eldest of four Southern California kids who grew up in the 1950s, become an ambitious eccentric who couldn't stop worrying? There was something about Randy traipsing around his apartment that reminded me to try to let go. No matter how truncated and seemingly lost, Randy was fine, living his life with a mind let loose. Sitting across from him, I thought: There is no scale tipped in either direction that can measure the worth of one person over another. All of us are, as Randy put it best, “a blink between here and never.”And of course, that's the only possible conclusion: Randy may not have been able to hold down a job or return his mother's affection, he may have caused decades of worry for the rest of the family, but he never hurt anyone but himself, and his life of uncelebrated art and poetry is as valuable as any. I hope Diane Keaton worked out what she needed to with this book, but I really think this is of more value to her than to the general public. Happy to have finally seen Annie Hall all the way through though.
